Hamilton ending poverty with fruit baskets
Maybe East St. Louis Township trustees just weren’t clear on their instructions.
When they resolved that credit card spending be limited to $1,000, maybe they just failed to communicate how that was the monthly goal. The three credit card holders only blew that limitation by about 10 percent if they thought it was a weekly limit.
Seriously, though, $210,000 in credit card spending during a four-year period would be outrageous by any publically-funded body. For that kind of spending to be going on in a community where 45 percent of the residents live below the poverty line is just plain criminal.
A wider examination of the township spending, mostly by Supervisor Oliver W. Hamilton Jr., shows cronyism and nepotism run wild with a unlimited line of credit.
Hamilton has East St. Louis City Councilman Robert Eastern III on the township payroll for $21,600 a year for a joke job keeping all those senior citizens in line during those wild senior luncheons. Then Eastern doesn’t feel the need to even show up or stop taking the money because there’s a vague family medical situation.
Hamilton also has his sister on the payroll for $33,000 as a financial consultant. She, too, is a city council member. Maybe she should have advised her brother and township leaders that it is neither financially prudent, nor ethical, nor legal to spend $210,000 via credit cards on some combination of questionable township expenses and themselves: Tires, trips to Vegas, car washes, gasoline and medical bills.
Well, they did spend $10,000 on Christmas fruit baskets for seniors. Poor, old people truly need their holiday fruit — or do they need receipts to show their taxes were spent on these little gifts rather than on more questionable items?
East St. Louis Township has an operating budget of $1.5 million. That money could do a little for a lot of poor people, or it could let a few elite members of the community live it up.
Township taxpayers should be demanding an explanation, or at least more fruit.
This story was originally published August 1, 2016 at 7:00 PM with the headline "Hamilton ending poverty with fruit baskets."